Artists Space

Conceived as an auto-curatorial experiment, The Rope Show provides another vision for how the Artists Space Slide File can function. Mike Ballou, Amy Sillman and Adam Simon, three Four Walls organizers, each indepen­dently selected one artist from the File. In making their selections, they limited themselves to artists whose work they liked but with which they were, in no way, already familiar with --professionally or personally. Guided by the same criteria, the first three artists selected by Ballou, Sillman and Simon chose three others from the file, who then selected three more, who in turn picked three more, and so on. Each artist then visited the studio of their chosen artist and actually selected the work for inclusion in the exhibition. The resulting exhibition is thus composed of three strands of six artists each, totalling 18 mutually selected artists.

It is also, however, an exhibition which, in eliminating the over-arching curatorial "eye" (which tends to impose order from above) and displacing the (usually dominant) role that familiarity plays as an organizing agent, actively experiments with, and problematizes the genre of the "group" show.